Grandparents may not take up full-time child care due to Budget - Telegraph.

Is it me, or is this story totally warped? "Campaigners" want parents to be able to pay taxpayer money allowed to them for child care to their parents in return for them looking after their own grandchildren? I had to read it three times. There is no direct speech in the linked text that should not make the speaker retire with a whisky and a pistol for shame at having become a craven, dependent lick spittle of the threadbare British state.

The Misses Paine tell me that there is no way they will have children. If, by chance, they change their minds I plan to be the sort of rakish granddad who drives his grandsons to the rugby in a thoroughly mad car and takes his granddaughters to plays and shows and generally spoils them rotten. I had two cool granddads (one of whom died very young) and would aim to honour their memories by doing all the stuff of which they would have approved.

And yes, there would be the routine support too. The extended family stuff that is natural to every mammal. Some of my best memories are of time spent with the Misses P as babies and toddlers. It was all too limited because a young man with no money behind him needs to get on with work. Frankly, it would be great to have young children around again, and to have the leisure to watch them grow this time.

The notion of money could never come into that. It just couldn't. It would make me sick to think the Misses P thought it necessary to raise it with me. Why does it not make the people in the article sick? Who in the name of all that's holy are these degenerates who see every human interaction in financial terms? It seems to me that most pressure groups, charities and campaigners in modern Britain are little better than pimps, looking to bring more and more of us into state dependency.

The money the "campaigners" want the grannies to be given is, after all, their own. Maybe if the wildly-out-of-control state were to be pruned back to the stem, future grannies might have the time and leisure to look after their grandchildren for love?